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PHOTO COURTESY OF RICE UNIVERSITY In his third year as the head men’s basketball coach at Rice University, Mahanoy Area graduate Mike Rhoades has guided the Owls to a 21-10 record heading into this week’s Conference USA Tournament. It’s only the eighth 20-win season in the program’s 103-year history and first since 2003-04.

PHOTO COURTESY OF RICE UNIVERSITY Rice University men’s basketball head coach Mike Rhoades calls out a play to his team. Rhoades, a Mahanoy Area High School graduate, leads his Owls into the Conference USA Tournament today.

From his glory days in high school at Mahanoy Area, to winning an NCAA Division III national championship at Lebanon Valley College, Rhoades put together a Hall-of-Fame career as a player.

Those winning ways continued as a collegiate coach, as the Mahanoy City native was a part of 18 straight winning seasons, a stretch that included four NCAA Division III playoff appearances as a head coach at Randolph-Macon College and a trip to the 2011 NCAA Division I Final Four as an assistant with Shaka Smart at VCU.

It should be no surprise, then, that the now 43-year-old has been able to quickly turn around the Rice University men’s basketball program.

After two straight losing campaigns, Rhoades’ Owls reached the 20-win plateau this season for the first time since 2004 and will take a 21-10 overall record into tonight’s Conference USA Tournament opener against Southern Miss at the Legacy Arena in Birmingham, Alabama.

It’s only the eighth 20-win season in the 103-year history of the Rice program.

“Since fifth grade, I never had a losing season before I got here,” said Rhoades, whose club is the fifth seed in the 12-team postseason tournament.

“I knew how bad the program was when I took over. It was wrecked. I knew that. And at a place like Rice, there are no quick fixes. You can’t go out and get a bunch of transfers or (junior college) kids.

“I knew it was going to be a process. But I wasn’t going to panic.”

Rhoades and his staff — associate head coach Scott

Pera and assistant coaches J.D. Byers and Brent Scott — began that rebuilding process immediately through strong recruiting and a foundation that stressed fundamentals.

They endured the struggles — a pair of 12-20 seasons that included losing two talented freshman guards to injury last season. They slowly built the Owls into a hard-working, scrappy group reminiscent of the Coal Region teams Rhoades played for and his uncle Mickey Holland coached at Mahanoy Area.

“We had a plan. We knew it would take some time, and we stuck to it,” Rhoades said by phone Monday. “It was hard. Some nights were harder than others. But we stuck to the plan.

“Brick by brick, player by player, making smart decisions in recruiting, we found guys that wanted to play for us. We jumped in head-first, not just stressing doing the right things in basketball, but the importance of the value of the education they were going to get at Rice.”

Two of those players were 6-foot-2 sophomore guard Marcus Evans from Chesapeake, Virginia, and 6-5 junior guard/forward Egor Koulechov from Volgograd, Russia, who were both named first-team All-Conference USA selections Monday.

Evans is third in C-USA in scoring at 18.8 points per game, scoring in double figures in 28 of 31 games and scoring at least 20 points a conference-high 16 times. A two-time C-USA first-teamer, his 584 points are the most by a sophomore in school history, and he was the fastest player in school and conference history to reach 1,000 career points, doing so in 49 games.

Koulechov is fourth in the league in scoring at 18.5, fourth in rebounding (8.9) and leads the C-USA in three-point field-goal percentage at 47.1 percent. Koulechov has recorded a team-high 11 double-doubles and has scored in double figures 29 times.

“Marcus was my first recruit,” Rhoades said. “I recruited the Chesapeake and Virginia Beach area when I was at Randolph-Macon and knew people there. I knew of Marcus since his freshman year when I was at VCU.

“He was the first phone call I made when I got the job at Rice. He’s a great kid from a great family, wants to win and get a good education, too.

“We asked him to do a lot from the start,” Rhoades continued. “It was almost unfair as a freshman to throw him into the fire. Instead of finding a role, he’s done it all. He’s an electric player.”

Rhoades’ coaching career began in 1996 and started with three years as an assistant coach under Hal Nunnally at Randolph-Macon before he took over as the Yellow Jackets’ head coach in 1999. Rhoades was 197-76 in 10 seasons at RMC, with three Old Dominion Athletic Conference Coach of the Year honors, six ODAC titles and four NCAA playoff appearances.

He moved on to VCU for the 2009-10 season, serving as an assistant coach for two seasons and the associate head coach for three. The Rams were 137-46 in that span, reaching the NCAA Tournament four times and becoming national darlings with a Final Four run in 2011.

Those two steps were vital, Rhoades said, to the success he’s had so far at Rice.

“In my 10 years at Randolph-Macon, the most important thing I learned was how to build a program,” Rhoades said. “As a D3 coach, you do everything, with not a lot of help. It really helped me find my way in college coaching, helped me know how to build a program, how to run it and operate it the right way.

“My time at VCU was great. I got to experience another style of play, another way to do things. That time with Shaka … we just had a lot of ideas floating around the office every day. You take what you like. It was a lot of fun.”

Top-seeded Middle Tennessee is the only team getting national consideration, and the conference will probably only get one team into the NCAA Tournament.

Rhoades’ club is extremely young, with 6-10 backup center Andrew Drone being the only senior.

The Owls’ starting lineup includes three sophomores and two juniors, with three freshmen coming off the bench. Starting center Corey Douglas, a 6-8 freshman, was lost for the season after nine games due to a hip injury and will get a medical redshirt.

While a bid to the NCAA or NIT tournaments might be out of reach this season, good things are on the horizon for Rhoades and the Owls.

“I’m excited about the mentality of the program and culture of the program,” Rhoades said. “I’m excited about what we’re doing.

“We came here to win. We came here to build a program, to win a championship. It’s going where we want it to go.”

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